Ben Jealous comes to Seaside to deliver a new book all about role models.

When I was a child growing up in Seaside in the 1970s and 80s, I was blessed to be surrounded by friends of all ethnic stripes and geographies – from Russia, Puerto Rico, Korea, Samoa, Panama, as well as the Midwest and South. Fort Ord, then, was a bustling hub of global migration.

That real world outside my doorstep was not reflected, however, on the TV inside our home, or the movie screens in Monterey and Fort Ord, or the magazine racks at the supermarket or in books at school.

The grownups around us (except for teachers) worked mostly at jobs instead of careers, or were absent from the home, or were working multiple jobs. When I imagined what I would grow up to become, the picture I conjured of my adult self as a scientist, a pilot or a police officer was not a black man, who looked like my Panamanian father, nor an Asian, who looked like my Korean mother, but a white man. A nondescript white man, like a drawing from a children’s book – that’s probably where I got the image from.

This is the power of the media. It can distort our perceptions of reality. But it helps if a vacuum exists. Ben Jealous likely knows this powerful lesson. He’s co-edited a book (with Trabian Shorters of black men’s networking group BMe) titled Reach: 40 Black Men Speak on Living, Leading and Succeeding, to fill that vacuum with positive role models.

Just the phrase “positive role models” has taken on the signifying code of “poor black youth.” That’s because historically, such visible role models have been hidden and diminished. There have been a few safe exceptions: church, entertainment and sports.

But Jealous and Shorters have found entrepreneurs, activists, nonprofit directors, authors, professors, broadcast executives, elected officials and psychotherapists in the echelon of professional black life. A world of smart, capable men who overcame poverty, crime, domestic violence or low expectations; men who’ve written essays about the hard roads they traveled and the rewards they earned.

They illuminate potential roads to a potential future. One in which black and brown boys, in particular, can see themselves as they are, and not have to fill in a doppleganger prescribed by media gatekeepers.

I have a son now. He is almost a year old, and he is perceptive. I watch him watching things and I can almost hear his conception of the world being constructed in his mind. And I hope that world is evolved, just and loving enough to make room for the breadth and the shape his dreams might take.

I think we’re OK. My wife and I are surrounded by a fairly harmonious and diverse community. But on the occasion we catch unprompted racist comments, we’ll reach for something like Jealous’ and Shorters’ book, and we’ll keep it close to home.

REACH book launch is 2-5pm (3pm talks begin) Sunday, April 19, at 1069 Broadway Ave., Seaside. Free. Read Ben Jealous and Trabian Shorters’ interviews on the Weekly’s Arts & Culture blog.